Mac Tips and Tricks – 5 Ways to Work Faster With Your Mac

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We all want to save time when working, and you can work more effectively with your Mac computer in hundreds of ways. Here are just a few:

1. Learn and Use Keyboard Shortcuts

Most Mac applications provide two, three, or four-key shortcuts for common tasks. Look in the menu bar of each app to see the available shortcuts. If you’re unsure what the symbols in the menus mean, switch to the Finder, choose To help > Mac Help, and search the help for “Symbols for special keys.” You can also create shortcuts for any menu item with Applications > System Preferences > Keyboard & Mouse > Keyboard Shortcuts.

laptop 2. Speed Up Common Tasks with Automator

If you do the same task repeatedly, create an Automator workflow for it. Automator (Applications > Automator) is Apple software that lets you create scripts or workflows to run automatically with a button’s click.

3. Control iTunes Quickly with SizzlingKeys

SizzlingKeys (http://www.yellowmug.com/sk4it/) is a simple utility that lets you assign keyboard shortcuts to common iTunes actions, such as play/pause, previous/next track, and volume up/down. You can then use the shortcuts to control iTunes from within any application. This is great as it saves you from switching to iTunes when you want to pause a song, for example.

4. Organize your Dock

Remove programs you never use from the Dock to make finding the ones you do easier. And if you regularly use a new piece of software, add it to the Dock. (An easy way to do this is to Control-click the icon in the Dock when the software’s running and choose To keep In Dock.)

5. Get a Handle on Spam

Junk email is a big time-waster. To reduce the spam you get, only give out your email address to people you know and trust. If you need to register for something on a website and you don’t trust their privacy policy, create an additional “disposable” email address and use that. Then you can drop that email address if it starts getting a lot of spam. Finally, take advantage of online spam filtering services and Apple Mail’s excellent built-in spam filter. That way, even if you do get spam, most of the time, you’ll never need to deal with it.